MECHANICVILLE, N.Y. (AP) – Stephen Dennis enlisted in the Navy soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Less than a year later, the raw 19-year-old recruit was thrust into fighting off the Solomon Islands and survived one of the fiercest naval battles in the South Pacific.
By the end of the war, the young sailor from upstate New York was a shipboard radioman helping news organizations get the word out to the world that the Japanese had officially surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945.
As Wednesday’s 70th anniversary of the surrender approached, Dennis reminisced recently about his military service, which began aboard the ill-fated USS Atlanta.
“I was fighting all the time,” Dennis, 93, said inside the public library in Mechanicville, his hometown 18 miles north of Albany. “Either they were shooting at us or we were shooting at them.”
Dennis enlisted four days after the Dec. 7, 1941 aerial assault on Hawaii brought the U.S. into the war. After an accelerated boot camp that lasted just 14 days, he was assigned to the Atlanta, a newly commissioned light cruiser. By the spring of 1942 the Atlanta was in the Pacific, where the ship participated in the Battle of Midway.